Scott Walker’s first act, even before his inauguration, was to kill the high-speed rail project that would have connected Madison and Milwaukee to Minneapolis and Chicago. He returned an $810 million grant to the federal government.

There’s an existing Amtrak line between Milwaukee and Chicago. It’s heavily used, financially viable, and badly in need of repair.

It turns out that this line needs $150 million in repairs and upgrades. That work would have been covered in the original federal grant. If Walker had taken the time to study the issue, he’d have known that.

Not only did we turn down the money to pay for needed repairs, we’re now financially on the hook for it.

In the name of saving $7 million per year in maintenance costs, Scott Walker cost us $150 million dollars.

That may not be a lot of money in big states like New York and California. It goes a long way out here. Earlier this year, Walker’s budget had a $143 million dollar hole in it. He had to raid a federal grant designed to help homeowners in mortgage trouble stay in their houses.

This isn’t the only time his ideological zeal has cost the state a large sum of money. That $150 million mistake could have balanced the budget.

Scott Walker claims to be a fiscal conservative. He isn’t.

Reason Two: Scott Walker’s office is at the center of a criminal investigation.

Public resources cannot be used for political campaigns. Period.

It’s a felony.

We’re serious about this in Wisconsin, and it doesn’t matter which party does it. Chuck Chvala, Democrat, used to be the State Senate majority leader. Now he’s a sad little felon without a law license. Why? Running a campaign operation from a state office.

Scott Walker was the Executive for Milwaukee County for eight years. Six of his closest associates have been charged with a total of fifteen felonies and three misdemeanors. These were not accidental violations of the law. The FBI is currently investigating a secret e-mail network that was set up specifically to subvert the laws against campaigning on the public’s time.

The closet where the router was hidden was only a few feet from Scott Walker’s office.

The more the John Doe probe widens, the more sickening twists it uncovers.

Tim Russell, Walker’s deputy chief of staff, has been indicted for theft of $11,000 from an event at the Milwaukee County Zoo to benefit military families. Walker himself didn’t steal the money, but he’s the one who transferred control of the funds away from an American Legion post to a longtime crony.

Scott Walker is the first Governor in Wisconsin’s history to set up a legal defense fund while in office. According to Wisconsin law, he can only do this if he (or agents acting at his direction) have violated Wisconsin election law.

Walker has consistently refused to reveal who’s funding his legal defense. He has refused to reveal which violations he’s being investigated for. He claims that he set up the fund to pay the costs of cooperating with the investigation. There’s no provision in the law for a “cooperation fund”.

As Walker’s fellow conservative, your natural first instinct is to want to believe in his innocence. I get that. I believed that President Clinton “did not have sex with that woman” long after my common sense should have told me otherwise.

Scott Walker has not been formally charged with any crime yet. However, it strains the imagination to think that he was in the middle of all this criminal activity, which was conducted on behalf of his campaign, and that he was an Eagle Scout the whole time.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Right now, there’s enough smoke to make me drop to the floor and look for a window exit.

Reason Three: Scott Walker is not a friend to Wisconsin’s outdoor sportsmen.

I’ll confess that I’m not much of an outdoorsman. I’d rather sip a latte and watch a movie with subtitles. (Some of your stereotypes about liberals are true.)

Scott Walker appointed a “deer czar” to manage Wisconsin’s deer herd. Rather than choose a naturalist from Wisconsin, Walker appointed (for $125,000 per year) an ideologue from Texas who believes that herd management is best left in the hands of private landowners.

Dr. Kroll has called public land management “the last bastion of communism”. I suspect Teddy Roosevelt would have a big-stick response to that statement.

There are things that the private sector can do more efficiently than the public sector. Managing public resources isn’t one of them. Google “Chicago parking meters” or “Wackenhut prisons” if you want to see what happens when a for-profit entity takes over a for-public service. Under Kroll’s model, the landowners set the prices for hunting with an eye toward generating maximum profit.

Currently, a buck on a private game farm can cost you up to $1000. It is difficult to imagine that the state-issued $24 deer tag would survive in such an economic climate.

Yes, and the politics of the right is about ideology and emotions. The teaparty far right will vote for Walker even if he was shown to be a murderer, rapist and child molester or guilty of the charges in the Criminal Investigation. They don't care and will vote for him regardless of character or past history. The must know he is a puppet for the Billionaires. Who can say why they vote against themselves.

I work with a few people that aren`t really "Tea Party", but are very republican.They said they were disappointed with the things $cot walker has done and said.( "I dropped a bomb" "Divide and Conquer" ) They said they would not have voted for him if they knew the state of Wisconsin would end up so divided.BUTThey`re going to vote for him asgain in the recall election, because "they don`t want the Democrats to win"